Podcasts

Podcasts are modern portable radio shows created at first to take advantage of Apple's iPods in the early 2000s. There are podcasts on every topics these days and a lot on comics. ComicBookBin adds its humble voice to continue filling you in.

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Podcasting borrows its name from Apple's iPod which revolutionized portable music and portable radio shows recorded and published on the Web. Through iTunes, millions of podcasts covering every topics can be found and listen to on iPods and of course every other mobile devices like Android smartphones or BlackBerry Playbooks.

ComicBookBin was late to the podcasting world although we like to think that we do add a lot to the core podcasting experience about comics. there are your classics like Comic Geek Speak, Comic Book Noise and Collected Comics Library. These guys have been covering comics thrugh podcasts for six years or more and reall have added to the podcasting landscape making comic book creators and personalities more approacheable to common readers by giving them a voice we can relate to.

What's interesting is understanding the tools of the trade used by podcasting. It used to be more complicated to produce podcasts. It used to be costly to get the right type of equipment and to host the big files produced on a Web server. As with everything related to computing and technology, everything has gotten easier and more accessible for buddying amateurs.

At ComicBookBin, we use very simple technology to podcast about comics every week. When live at an event, we record with a middle range Sony camcorder. It doesn't block ambient sounds coming from other directions though which means there often is some echo and a lot of background noises that have ti be edited out or cleaned up. To clean audio we rely on Adobe Soundbooth. It's designed for professionals doing light audio work as part of their daily routine but not to the same extent as a radio producer. Adobe has a more advanced program for that called Audition which is the former popular program called Cool Edit. However, there are other great programs at least on Windows computers for sound edits such as Sony's Sound Forge.

Sound Forge is a classic audio editing and production software with many versions for prosumers and dedicated audio professionals. The good thing about Sound Forge is that it hasd given lieu to Sony Vegas which is the de facto video editing software used by ComicBookBin since 2005. Sony Vegas shares the same core audio editing features of Sound Forge but with solid video editing features and an interface easier and more logical than Adobe Premiere or FinalCuts Pro. Premiere, let's admit it, even if it's a classic of video editing for professionals who cannot afford Avid or Media 100 is still clunky and not elegant. FinalCuts has been popular on the Apple platform and has certainly been used extensively by video producers and probably many podcasters. However, Apple's sandboxed approach to features can live a lot to be desired and a whopping production bill that's not really justified. There are virtually no benefits in using Apple systems anymore nowadays when competent and often superior Windows solutions are available and with much more production flexibily.

Most "studio" based podcasts recorded with guests and staff writers of ComicBookBin are recorded with Skype for tele conference. We found that Skype audio is of better quality than a phone line. The sound is much clearer and less mechanical. Of course, Skype is the most unreliable program on the planet with frequent drop lines or corrupted voices that start to sound robotic. The adventurous podcaster better be used to thatand warn his guests that he may have to iterrupt them at any point and askeveryone to restart a fresh instance of Skype.

To record audio from a Skype conference call, ComicBookBin relies on the recording features of Sony Vegas and some Beats Audio technology included in a regular Hewlet Packard multimedia production laptop.It's not a recording studio and definitely not what professional broadcsaters would use, but it does the job.

Once podcast recordings are cleaned in Sony Vegas, they are exported as FM radio qyuality MP3 files to ComicBookBin's serverand promptly added to our iTunes channel through XML. We use an Adobe Flah player for users that want to pkay the file on our server but also include a download option for listeners who prefer listening and downloading the audio file on their computers, tablets or phones. ComicBookBin podcasts can even be listened to or downloaded from our ComicBookBin apps.

We hope to contribute a lot to the world of podcasting for comics as we find our own voice over the next few moths. Now take a look at our podcasts.

Come and listen to the first podcast from The Comic Book Bin. Hosted by Dan Horn @dan_horn and Hervé St-Louis @ladventurer. Our guest this week, discussing SOPA is Brett Schenker from GraphicPolicy.com @graphicpolicy